Introducing an online community for chemical engineering educators

It has often been claimed that teaching is the role of a professor for which there is the least formal preparation. A new professor will be thrown into a classroom and be expected to teach, often without any training in how to teach effectively. While there are many opportunities for preparation (National Effective Teaching Institutes, training provided by one's institution, conferences such as ASEE's Annual Conference), it is often difficult to get the sort of timely help a new faculty member might wish to have to teach a new course successfully. This paper introduces a web-based forum designed to provide just-in-time strategies for classroom effectiveness. In this scenario, experienced faculty would also benefit from the experience of others teaching similar courses. Beyond the course teaching responsibilities, there are numerous engineering education related topics for which the ability to share and aggregate information and documents in a central virtual location would be invaluable. The Chemical Engineering Division (ChED) of the American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) is addressing these needs by launching a virtual community for chemical engineering educators, the ChED Forum (http://www.aseeched.org/Forum). Faculty members worldwide will be empowered to share suggestions, comments, and resources. This knowledge is valuable but perhaps not readily disseminated by traditional conference papers and presentations; the ChED Forum would provide access to this knowledge instantaneously. Additionally, timely announcements, such as calls for papers, REU opportunities, employment opportunities, and other similar announcements will be aggregated on (or linked to from) a single website. This paper will introduce the current design of the ChED Forum, describe its intended use, provide instruction on posting and reading from the site, and provide a vision statement for the future development of this community. Most importantly, the active participation of faculty members will be solicited to develop this Forum as dynamic community of chemical engineering educators, promising to help improve the quality of a chemical engineering education worldwide.